Christian Klein, Author at 51��Africa News Center

You Already Track Productivity – Now is the Time to Measure Sustainability

Christian Klein — Thu, 13 Jan 2022 08:03:58 +0000

The CEO of 51��urges leaders to apply the same rigor to managing carbon emissions as they do to managing their workforce.

In all my customer interactions, there isn’t a company I’ve spoken to that doesn’t put sustainability at the top of their business agenda. We even see large oil and gas companies taking steps towards greener operations, products, and services. No matter their size, region, or industry, companies are increasingly becoming aware that in addition to managing their top and bottom lines, they also need to focus on managing their green line. It’s also one of the reasons why many CFOs and other business leaders are looking at sustainability as an asset that adds value to a company as opposed to a liability.

Consumer awareness around global challenges such as climate change, pollution, and inequality has increased. Customers are no longer making purchasing decisions based only on products or price. They want to buy from companies that support causes they care about.

Buyers are just one side of the equation. When we look at today’s workforce, surveys show that employees expect businesses to invest in the social and environmental well-being of the communities they serve. Research from found that giving back in this way is associated with greater employee retention, higher levels of brand ambassadorship, and motivated employees.

Meanwhile, many investors are seeking out companies with a strong ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) record—in 2020 alone, sustainable funds , one quarter of the total amount of new investments made last year. Research confirms that good sustainability and ESG practices correlate with lower operating costs, better profitability, and superior share price performance. According to some studies, corporate responsibility practices can help organizations boost overall sales revenues up to 20%. Put simply, sustainability has already become a key factor in how we do business.

But many companies struggle to embed sustainability into the core processes of their business. I recently talked to the CEO of one of the largest automotive OEMs. He told me that they don’t know the carbon footprint of their products because they have no transparency into their supply chain. In fact, 60% of the carbon footprint resulting from the production of a vehicle is caused by actions further up or down the supply chain.

Businesses already use technology to manage their supply chains, workforces, and business processes. These data and systems can also help businesses better understand and minimize the carbon footprint of their products and operations. Specifically, by embedding sustainability data into business processes and by using information businesses already collect—such as bills of material, energy usage and procurement data—companies can get a clearer view of their overall carbon footprints.

With technology, automakers can do a deep dive on the CO2 emissions of their plants to measure which facilities are the greenest. For instance, the automotive executive I just mentioned could have visibility not only into the carbon emissions from production of his company’s vehicles, but also emissions from raw materials, transporting supplies, and shipping finished cars. The possibilities are endless. So, what can companies do to accelerate their sustainability efforts? Based on my many conversations, there are four things that stand out:

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Every company needs to have clear goals, but they also need to track their progress by harnessing digital technologies.
:��Don’t wait for regulations and carbon taxes to kick in. If sustainability is built into your strategy, you can manage the material impact on your financial results.
We must come together in networks. No country, government, business, scientific community, or society will be able to tackle climate change alone. We will only be able to turn concepts like the circular economy into reality by bringing together all stakeholders and ensuring visibility not only within a company’s four walls, but across entire supply chains.
Change starts from the top. As with every other transformation, reaching sustainability goals comes down to one thing: people. Every change requires a shift in mindset, organizational structure, and culture – and this starts at the top.

There is no doubt that businesses are faced with many challenges today. But they also have an incredible opportunity to set their companies up for future success by helping create sustainable communities for the people they serve. By embedding sustainability into their strategy, businesses can differentiate and distinguish themselves as leaders who create enhanced value for all stakeholders—making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.

Christian Klein is Chief Executive Officer and member of the Executive Board of 51��SE

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Carbon Accounting: You Can’t Manage What You Don’t Measure

Christian Klein — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 05:00:06 +0000

Of all the challenges the world is facing today, climate change represents the greatest threat. Tipping points that we did not expect to see crossed for many years have already been reached, and there is little time left to stop irreversible and disastrous changes to the Earth’s climate systems.

The global pursuit of net-zero carbon emissions is a huge undertaking. A significant transition to renewable energy alone can only address . The other 45% result from transportation, land use, building management, and the production of consumer and industrial goods. This shows that taking climate action requires many different, interlinking solutions and needs to be a joint endeavor among nations, civil societies, and business alike.

The shift toward sustainable business practices is being driven by governments, consumers, investors, and even employees. While most companies monitor and measure the CO2 emissions of their production sites, customers are increasingly demanding visibility into the full carbon footprint of the individual products they purchase.

As one result, companies need to move from the linear economic model that still dominates the industry today to the principle of circularity – a systemic shift that builds long-term resilience, generates business and economic opportunities, and provides environmental and societal benefits.

In this new equation, carbon is increasingly becoming a new vehicle of transformation. It is effectively a global, universal “currency” that can be tracked, traded, managed, and minimized like any other resource. Still, for most businesses, managing carbon is either seen as a necessary cost of doing business, or a tax that serves as a penalty. One way or the other, it is considered to be corrosive to profits.

But what if we could convert carbon management into an investment strategy that can also drive profit? What if we could make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable, without sacrificing one for the other?

This is just as visionary as it is promising. Let’s take the example of a large fast-moving consumer goods company. On a five- to 10-year horizon, depending on legislative developments, for avoided offsetting spend of one to two percent of revenue per year, top-line growth of one to three percent of revenue per year, and cost savings of €2 to 5 million per year based on more accurate and efficient emissions accounting and reporting.

This needs software that helps companies measure, account, and take the right action – and 51��is uniquely positioned to help enterprises tackle this challenge. As we run the supply chains of the largest companies in the world, we can play a central role in helping companies manage their green line by minimizing the carbon footprint and negative environmental impact of their products.

Watch this space for more information on the and further details on how we help companies to responsibly manage their green line.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.
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51��and Microsoft: How We Simplify Business Collaboration

Christian Klein — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 08:01:50 +0000

Rarely a day passes where I am not in contact with customers, partners, or colleagues from around the globe. Whether it’s a brief exchange of ideas, a virtual meeting, or a quick phone call, efficient communication drives work to success.

Particularly with many still working from home, I cannot imagine what daily communication and collaboration would look like without Microsoft Teams – and I think this holds true for much of the business community in a lot of enterprises.

So it came as no surprise that when we announced our new RISE with SAP offering, a highlight for many was Satya Nadella joining me to share his thoughts on how Microsoft and 51��team up to lift collaboration to the next level. One aspect many of you were particularly interested in is how we will integrate 51��solutions with Microsoft Teams, so let’s have a look at some examples.

Putting Collaboration into Business Context

For many companies around the world, remote selling has become a necessity for conducting business. To simplify remote sales processes and allow sales professionals to fully focus on their customer engagements, we will integrate 51��Sales Cloud with Microsoft Teams. Users can easily set up meetings from the 51��system without switching applications. During a customer call, all information will be accessible in Microsoft Teams via an embedded 51��Sales Cloud application. Finally, all information, including meeting recording and notes, will get automatically synced back to 51��Sales Cloud in real time. Check out this to get an idea of what this scenario will look like:

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All of us know how much easier business life is when you have everything you need at your fingertips. Thanks to integrating Microsoft Teams with 51��S/4HANA through 51��Conversational AI, end users can seamlessly get all business-relevant information and critical business insights instantly. Chatbots help them identify and reach out to business contacts directly. In a first instance, we will focus on one concrete business persona: the operational purchaser. Over time, we will develop chatbots for more use cases and make the content available to our customers through templates so they can adopt custom-specific adjustments that meet their conversational AI needs.

Many customers use 51��Analytics Cloud in addition to Microsoft Teams for generating data-driven insights into their business. By bringing together 51��Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams, we enable users to benefit from both augmented and smart capabilities of 51��Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ strong collaboration capabilities. Combining the power, we will provide an integrated solution for reporting and planning access with direct utilization of enhanced collaboration functionalities from the daily business workflow.

Time to Explore

To simplify users’ collaboration processes and enhance workplace productivity, we are exploring many more integration scenarios. A lot of 51��solutions could form a robust symbiosis with Microsoft Teams, and we will cover a wide range of use cases across lines of business – from procurement to recruiting, talent management, and learning to travel and expense management.

Take 51��Business Network as an example: While it helps drive process efficiency through predefined messages, documents, and rules that can be shared and processed systematically, Microsoft Teams complements 51��solutions through collaboration capabilities like online meetings, chats, and more. Together, the solutions would enable users to run business processes efficiently while being resilient to disruptions.

Or imagine you are a recruiter working with our human experience management (HXM) solutions, wanting to finalize a contract with a prospective hire. By integrating Microsoft Teams, you could extract the contract from your 51��system, edit it in Microsoft Teams, trigger a call to confirm the changes with the recruiter, and store the contract back in your 51��system without changing applications.

As you can see, the opportunities are endless! The first integration scenarios are planned to go live throughout this year, with the integrations for 51��Sales Cloud and 51��S/4HANA to come in the second quarter, and others to follow suit. These will mainly focus on classic use cases, such as setting up Microsoft Teams meetings directly via the 51��applications. Next are then even bolder steps as we plan to enable context-based collaboration through 51��systems and Microsoft Teams. This will allow users to access all relevant information about their interaction in Microsoft Teams through their 51��systems or vice versa, anywhere and anytime.

Ultimately, with this, we will step up the employee experience and enable smooth and frictionless interactions across all levels of enterprises and their environment.

Want to learn more? Check out “Microsoft and SAP: Expanding Our Partnership,” from Thomas Saueressig.

By Christian Klein, CEO of SAP.
This story originally appeared on and the 51��Global News Center.

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Introducing RISE with 51��– Business Transformation as a Service

Christian Klein — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 07:08:01 +0000

At SAP, we want to be our customers’ trusted partner both in times of success and turbulence, and as such, staying close to them and their needs is crucial. Talking to many CEOs and decision makers during the last months, it became clear that only companies that can transform and adapt quickly to today’s volatile environment – just think COVID-19, climate change, and geopolitical tensions – .

While everyone understands the why and the opportunities of digital transformation, the hardest part seems to be how to holistically transform. Indeed, many companies think that digital transformation will happen just by performing a technical migration to the cloud or by buying new technology. The need for changing how an enterprise runs with the help of new business models and more intelligent processes is often ignored.

So we asked ourselves: what can we do to support our customers on this journey even better? How can we help them change the culture and mindset of their enterprises, redesign their business processes, and reduce internal complexity, ultimately enabling them to adopt new business models and stay ahead of their competition?

Let’s be honest: Infrastructure as a Service or Software as a Service alone won’t cut it. To truly transform, companies need a holistic offering. What they really need is Business Transformation as a Service.

Our answer to this is RISE with SAP. Together with our ecosystem, we are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business with a fast time to value — at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point. It simplifies our customers’ journey in three simple steps.

Step 1: Business Process Redesign

Making use of best practices and building on SAP’s unique data treasures, our Business Process Intelligence solution allows customers to continuously analyze how processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards, and provide tailored recommendations on how to adopt new business models, automate, and standardize processes. Thanks to a direct connection to SAP’s workflow, robotic process automation (RPA), and other artificial intelligence (AI) services, intelligence can be seamlessly embedded in business processes.

Step 2: Technical Migration

Embedded in RISE with 51��are technical services to smooth the migration to a standard, modular, and flexible solution landscape with a consistent data layer – key to reacting quickly to new business demands. This includes essential services by 51��and partners to get rid of modifications and custom code and to support them in harmonizing and governing their data layer so they can run and steer their company based on one source of truth.

Step 3: Build Your Intelligent Enterprise

The basis is the cloud infrastructure. Customers will gain a reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to their existing landscapes, by running the workloads in an 51��data center or via the hyperscalers, always with the best operations costs in the industry. And no matter which infrastructure they chose or who the operations partner is, 51��will be their single point of contact.

Also part of RISE with 51��is 51��Business Technology Platform, the foundation of the Intelligent Enterprise. Customers and partners can quickly develop innovations to easily complement 51��solutions – thanks to one semantical data model, one AI and analytics layer, one identity and authorization concept, and the same application business services, such as one workflow management. Additional low-code/no-code capabilities make it even easier to expand our solutions. And our platform enables out-of-the-box integration: 51��to SAP, but also 51��to non-SAP.

Access to 51��Business Network is also included. Times when companies are managing their business within four walls with one-to-one connections to the stakeholders across the supply chain are over. From now on, it is all about managing the complete supply chain in real time — to react faster than anyone else to changing market conditions.

And finally, as you need intelligent applications to truly change how your business runs, we will include our market-leading intelligent ERP, 51��S/4HANA Cloud. Customers not only can pick their deployment of choice depending on their level of standardization, but also benefit from embedded AI, RPA, and advanced analytics. And as we all have realized how important it is to run a frictionless enterprise, we will integrate Microsoft Teams across our solution portfolio to bring collaboration to the next level.

In short: RISE with 51��provides our customers with the basic components of an intelligent enterprise in one bundle, complemented with premium services and tools. One offer. One contract for SAP-related services. One responsible party for service-level agreements, operations, and issue handling. It’s as simple as that.

Building on this kickstart, companies can tailor their intelligent enterprise to meet their respective business needs. Customers and partners alike can easily complement, extend, and integrate with any other of our line-of-business and industry solutions, partner, or third-party solution, using exactly the same data model and business services as our own 51��apps. This allows them to run their core and industry-specific processes – seamlessly, end-to-end, and top-to-bottom, with full 360° transparency.

For more information, check out the following blogs by my colleagues Juergen Mueller, Thomas Saueressig, and Uwe Grigoleit, as well as an interview with Jan Gilg, and see what our partners have to say.

Christian Klein is CEO of SAP.

This article first appeared on the 51��Global News Center

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How to Use Digital Transformation to Create a More Sustainable World

Christian Klein — Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:38:17 +0000

Business leaders solve multiple challenges every day. But are we prepared to solve the following? There are 7.7 billion people on the planet today. Already tomorrow, it will be 190,000 more.

Companies today are judged on the positive contribution they make to society.
Concern is growing about how technology is affecting jobs, inequality, health, and security.
Digital transformation changes how companies manage their relationships with the larger world.

Indonesia announced plans to move its capital away from Jakarta as the city is sinking 25 centimeters per year due to rising sea levels and land subsidence, with underground water supplies being drained. The average income of the richest 10 percent of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10 percent across the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Not our business? Well, it is now. Solving today’s biggest challenges requires all of us to act, no matter if in the economic, technological, societal, or educational field – because all our actions are interdependent.

Critical minds might ask why companies should bother, with their primary reason being to make money. These critics should not underestimate the power of the consumer.

Consumers today have access to more information than ever. They know exactly what they want, and they know how to get it. The best product at the best price is always available at their fingertips.

But their criteria have changed — an increasing number of customers aren’t just making decisions based on products or price anymore. They are closely looking into what a brand says, what it does, and what it stands for.

It’s the same with employees; they aren’t just joining companies for the money. They choose companies that embrace their responsibility toward humankind and the planet. Put simply, companies today don’t just prosper based on their financial performance, but on how they make a positive contribution to society.

No matter where you look, concern is growing about how technology is affecting issues such as jobs, wages, inequality, health, resource efficiency, and security. These changes are altering the world so drastically that all companies need to undergo a transformation to avoid going extinct.

This transformation means integrating digital technology into all areas of a business to fundamentally change how companies operate and deliver value to customers. While this might be a scary vision for some, it is one of the strongest drivers of change. Companies need to adapt their business models to remain in business.

Technology and digitalization will help them achieve this with intelligent and highly agile digital supply chains that predict and respond to changes in the ecosystem to quickly capitalize on new opportunities and break down old barriers.

To do so, it takes modern technology, flexible data management, and highly agile processes. Only then will companies be able to establish new business models that connect an ecosystem of partners together in an end-to-end value chain that makes life easier for customers.

But transformation is also about a change of culture, which requires a radical rethinking of people, processes, and technologies. Becoming a digital organization means not only having digital products and services, but also powering core business processes and operations with technology. This often includes tectonic changes to tasks in a company and to the ways colleagues interact within the whole ecosystem.

And just like a business cannot digitally transform unless – or until – its people transform, I believe that, while they come with their own environmental costs, technology and digitalization can play a crucial role in developing solutions for a better tomorrow.

Just think about blockchain, with its incredible potential to add trust through traceability across food supply chains, helping manufacturers, consumers, and regulators alike. Artificial intelligence (AI) can empower people with disabilities, for example, by translating eye movements into program commands, or reduce bias in the hiring process. Smart cities work in conjunction with everything from sensors to open data collection and smart streetlights to provide better services and protect resources.

This sounds easy, but it needs a lot of transformation. Transformation inside companies by integrating digital technology into all areas of their business. Transformation of a company’s internal culture, with leaders setting the tone of a company, embracing change and embodying and instilling trust for and with their employees. Transformation of society’s perception of technology.

There is no doubt that technology and digital transformation break down silos and create transparent and unified data for objective decision-making. But even more so, they change how companies manage their relationships with the wider world.

The . If we want to create a cohesive and sustainable world, we must be able to look beyond corporate boundaries and toward the societies and communities in which we operate. We need to establish an ecosystem of trust in which we can unite and build bridges, a network of links that allows us to exchange ideas to create a safety net for the most marginalized, those who live in areas of conflict, those whose lives are being disrupted by the climate emergency.

In the end, any transformation will succeed or fail with people. No amount of technology will save an organization without a competent workforce. Therefore, we must bring people in on this massive transformation toward a better future. As global citizens, we not only have rights, we also have responsibilities and obligations.

Let’s seize the time in Davos to discuss and to collaborate, to foster change and to come up with an action plan on how our society is ready to advance. It is up to all of us to use technological advancements to tackle the world’s greatest challenges and turn them into our biggest opportunities. The world depends on us to do so.

Christian Klein is co-CEO of 51��SE.
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Christian Klein, Author at 51����Africa News Center